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GRAMOPHONE (03/2017)
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Supraphon
SU4208



Code-barres / Barcode : 0099925420826

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Reviewer: Hannah Nepil

You might have heard of František Jiránek, the Czech violinist and composer who was born in 1698 on a Czech aristocrat’s estate, possibly studied with Vivaldi in Venice, then returned to play and compose in Count Morzin’s court in Prague. You might even have heard a few of his arresting instrumental concertos and not quite so arresting sinfonias. Beyond that, things start to get woolly. Even his tiny but tenacious coterie of devotees is still struggling to establish the exact authorship of music generally attributed to him.  

Such mysteries, though, are key to Supraphon’s exploration of ‘Music from Eighteenth Century Prague’. This latest release in the series makes a feature of the ambiguities surrounding certain works. Who wrote the Concerto in D for violin: Jiránek or Vivaldi? And can we hold Jiránek personally responsible for the idiosyncrasies of his Concerto in A, not least the unusual viola d’amore part? Or are they the doing of his copyist, the 19th-century d’amore virtuoso Carl Zoeller?

For all the booklet-notes’ enthusiastic musings, this disc doesn’t provide any answers. But it does familiarise us with music that, on the whole, deserves to be better known. Jiránek, like Vivaldi, has a particular talent for slow movements: so much is achieved with so little, and that’s as evident in the haunting Adagio of the Flute Concerto in D, with its keening solo melody, as it is in the sighing middle movement of the Triple Concerto in A. Elsewhere there are hits and misses. The oboe concertos sound like Vivaldi on autopilot, lively though they are. But the Bassoon Concerto in G is much more inventive, ingeniously exploiting the instrument’s timbre, whether in the lowing Adagio or in the genial outer movements. Sergio Azzolini, who has reconstructed the concluding ritornello for this incomplete concerto, is the outstanding soloist, while Collegium Marianum, under their artistic director Jana Semerádová, play with punch and attention to detail.

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